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Executive Committee Minutes
June 27, 2004

Present: Terri Miller (Michigan State), Maira Bundza (Western Michigan), Jackie Byrd (Indiana), John DeSantis (Dartmouth), Joanna Dyla (Stanford), Inna Gudanets (Stanford), Jared Ingersoll (Columbia), Soobum Kim (Stanford), Pat Kreitz (Stanford), Janice Pilch (Illinois), Brad Schaffner (Harvard), Cathy Zeljak (George Washington)

Minutes: The minutes of the January, 2004 committee meeting in San Diego were approved as submitted.

ACRL Board: Pat Kreitz reported on issues and activities of the ACRL Board, including:

• ACRL Strategic Planning: The ACRL Strategic Plan is viewed as a "living document", one that promotes strategic thinking. The implementation draft will be done after this conference, linking action items to goals. ACRL took feedback from the Mid-Winter Conference to improve the document and passed the revised document at Annual.

• Membership Dues: ACRL is faced with revising membership dues, after being "in the red". Dues have not been raised for ACRL in quite some time. The Board is looking at two options:
  • Categories of Membership: An affiliate membership (as yet undefined) for $35.00 and a regular membership for $50.00. Both memberships would still require an ALA membership in addition to ACRL membership.
  • Sliding Scale Based on Income: The scale has yet to be defined.
  The SEES discussion raised issues, including:
  • If the regular membership allowed for unlimited section memberships, then the Newsletter expenses could be a significant issue for SEES
  • A librarian's salary often reflects more the cost-of-living of where (s)he lives than her/his ability to pay higher dues, so the sliding scale may not be as fair as it initially seems.
  • It's really the ALA dues that are financially draining, not the ACRL dues.
• ALA President's Program & ACRL Reception: The President's Program will be June 28th, 1:30-4:00 in the Rosen Center Ballroom and will be followed by the ACRL Reception for the Academic and Research Librarian of the Year.
• Section Involvement in Strategic Plan: The action list for the Strategic Plan will include Section Involvement. If SEES wants to be involved in any of these action items, we should step forward.
• Brochures: Pat passed around two brochures on scholarly communication. For more information, see:
  
  • http://www.createchange.org/resources/brochure.html
    
  • http://www.arl.org/sparc/

• Nominating Committee: The Nominating Committee met and is on course for having candidates for Chair/Chair-Elect, Member-at-Large, and Secretary.
• Newsletter: Terri Miller reported:
  • The next issue is progressing on schedule >LI> Digitization of old issues will begin soon and will be made available in PDF format
• Program Planning Committee: There will be no 2005 program. The idea of "EU and Libraries" was not workable. "Digitization of Medieval Manuscripts: East and West" was considered, a joint program with WESS, but it was decided that there were too many other time commitments. Janice Pilch will meet with Heather Ward, chair of WESS Program Planning Committee to let Heather know SEES's decision. She will discuss with Heather the possibility of SEES being a financial sponsor only.
• Automated Bibliographic Control Committee: Inna Gudanets reported:
  • The ABC Home Page has been updated by Soobum Kim
  • Soobum will notify LC and give them the correct URL for the updated Slavic Cataloging Manual. Catalogers' Desktop still links to the Princeton version.
  • Changes decided on at the San Diego meeting regarding the former Yugoslavia were made to the Slavic Cataloging Manual.
  • ABC is beginning a new project to investigate the availability and use of vendor supplied records for Slavic and East European language materials. A survey will be made available on the WWW, and an email will be sent to a pre-determined list and to slavlibs requesting Slavic librarians to fill out the survey. The project will be completed and final report made at the Mid-Winter conference.

Committee Membership: Janice Pilch reported that SEES has 25 active members and requested that committee chairs check the ACRL committee rosters for accuracy. They will be updated in early July. July 2nd is the deadline to add committee members. The next time we can add committee members is in March.

Janice reported on a new ACRL initiative to track contacts for new SEES members. Each month the chair receives a list members who have added or dropped SEES membership. Making contact with members on this list will be the responsibility of the chair-elect.

Status of Section Changes:

• The Continuing Education Committee has been eliminated
• The Preservation and Electronic Resources Committees have been merged into the Access and Preservation Committee
• The elimination of the Member-at-Large position will take 2 years for final approval, because it needs a Bylaws vote on the ballot. The rationale for eliminating this position is that it has no formal duty except to attend the Executive Committee Meeting. Terri Miller reported that, with this new Strategic Plan, ACRL seems to be much more open to ideas, resulting in SEES being a much freer section. Because of our recent changes, ACRL views SEES as a section facing its issues and is willing to let us "fly under the radar".

• This could involve chat software or just arrange to have everyone participating on email at the same time
• We would need to advertise on slavlibs ahead of time
• Do we want to try a virtual meeting?
• Will ALA charge for virtual meetings in the future?
• Should committees offer a combination--discuss issues ahead of time, so that members can participate without attending and then report again after the conference?
• The virtual/physical combination meeting is more work for the chairs.
• Those whose conference funding is based on participation could get less funding if SEES goes to virtual meetings.
• Some of us get the same dollar amount whether we go to 1 ALA Conference or 2, so a virtual conference would be better for us, if we were only attending for SEES.

Virtual Online Authority File: Joanna Dyla raised the issue of the Virtual Online Authority File and whether SEES should have a voice. Terri Miller will email slavlibs and give the email addresses for RLG and OCLC.

Submitted by Jackie Byrd

Last updated 9/26/04